In a distributed computing environment, heterogeneous components of a database management system can be hosted on multiple servers. A database management application can have multiple software modules, such as Web servers, application servers, databases, and load balancers. The software modules can be hosted on a variety of computers running on a variety of operating systems. Each of the computers can have a unique system configuration. Each software module can also have an individualized or unique logging mechanism. For example, a system log can contain memory usage, disk usage, Input/Output (I/O) frequency, paging frequency, etc. A Web server log can contain access time, access Internet Protocol (IP) address, and page visited. An application log can contain tracing information. A database log can contain number of active connections, number of commits, number of reads, etc.
A system administrator is often required to monitor the status of software modules on a variety of servers. For example, in a complex Web-based, database-backed application, a system administrator needs to monitor the health of each database on each server, and load-balance the system by directing a next request to a proper database. For another example, if a Web-based, database-backed application fails to respond to a user request, a system administrator needs to locate a component in the system that failed. The failure can be a software failure or a hardware failure. The system administrator can identify a failed component by viewing logs for each software module and each computer.
Traditionally, system and database log files are vendor proprietary. A database vendor can provide homogeneous log files for the vendor's database, even when the database runs on a variety of operating systems. Similarly, a computer vendor can provide a homogeneous log files for the computer vendor's computers, no matter what database runs on the computers. Furthermore, technologies exist to view both a server log file and system log files in a single viewer. However, no existing solutions provide a unified viewer for interactive display of disparate log files.